Higo Blog

What would you think if your older brother told you about his dream? I’m still shaking my head in disbelief…

The water in a reservoir on Awajishima, where Justin and I usually go fishing, dropped by about 20 feet. Giant clams lay with their guts exposed, frozen gasping in death. Among the detritus exposed on the mudflats was this bleached deer skull (more skull pics here). Fittingly, we caught no fish on this day.

Kicking back on a weekend.

This week I will be going through pictures that I have taken over the last two years and posting a few. These may be the last “real” pictures that I post until I get a new camera, because my well-used Casio has taken such abuse over the two years that I have owned it that it is almost completely broken. Unlike the Man in Black there will be no Inigo Montoya or Fezzik to resurrect it from the clutches of death.

A garden in Kyoto.

For some reason, Rex has been running through my thoughts lately. I miss you, dude.

My “grand-successor”, Ted Grudin, is keeping a blog in Ubuyama. I think that Ubuyama may be the best documented of any rural area in Kyushu, thanks to the progressive posts from this blog, Jane’s, and Ted’s. Cool. Keep up the posting, Ted…

It seems that the DFG is going to continue to cut back on stocking trout in the Sierras (here’s the link). On top of this, trout are actually being removed from lakes to protect the threatened populations of yellow legged frogs.
I have fond memories of going fishing with our family, and coming home with a stringer full of trout. We caught so many rainbow trout that we frequently tossed them back. I remember being amazed that a farmed rainbow trout could be caught by using bubble gum as bait.
The new approach to balancing a healthy eco-system vs. the interests of anglers is a good change of policy, but I am glad that I was able to catch as many fish as I was able to (made up mostly of stocked trout). I look back at old pictures and just stare sometimes. How many jars of Potski’s, garlic marshmallows, chartreuse Powerbait and containers of earthworms and nightcrawlers did we go through?
As I am writing this, I remember that I don’t like the taste of trout and how laborious it is to pick out all of the bones, and the other issues that the catching of fish entails. For one, fishing was a good way of exploring the ethical implications and responsibilities inherent in taking an animal’s life for sport. What ever we caught, we had to clean and eat- that was the rule.
Cleaning a still gasping trout was traumatic the first couple of times I did it. I learned to respect the fish that I caught, and only keep what I intended to eat from that point on. On that note, I think the last time that I ate a rainbow trout that I caught was when I was over 10 years ago. Like I said, it doesn’t taste very good (unless it comes from cold water, or if it is coated in bread crumbs and fried in lemon butter if I remember correctly).

This fierce-looking arachnid is about the size of an eight year-old’s hand. I’d love to see a face-off between a hand spider and a house centipede…

Just in case you happen to have a chunk of Nutria meat in the fridge and don’t know what to do with it, here are some recipes from The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. I wonder if capybaras are good eating too…